Armageddon/Women in Love

There's site-specific, and there's site-arbitrary, and we get a bit of both in this latest instalment of Mark Ravenhill's cycle of short plays. We are led towards the first, Women in Love, by a besuited gent in broken angel's wings - a recurring motif. Along Notting Hill's handsome streets we go, into a wee private park, under an arch of shrubbery towards a magical glade. And there, three actors stand at their microphones to deliver a static prose-drama about a cancer patient and his visiting lover.

I could have used an angel to steer me towards the meaning, as well as the location, of this playlet, which is slight, opaque and relates not a jot to its sylvan setting. Jennifer Higham is the likable centre of attention, as the girlfriend shielding convalescent Dan from his newspapers, where images of war proliferate. Her protective instincts, she believes, are indicative of woman's deeper capacity for love - an opinion the play counters when Dan's gay nurse speaks of his own lover, a serving soldier in Iraq.

The play, like its successor Armageddon, is in reported speech rather than dialogue, which feels too writerly and interposes between audience and action. Ravenhill infuses the second piece with biblical cadences, as a woman meets a younger man in a US motel. "And every day, we bring freedom and democracy to the world," intones Gary Shelford's Honor. But there's little freedom on display here, as the couple's lust wrestles with their God-terrified conscience, and Madeleine Potter's Emma sees her soldier son's death reported on the motel TV.

The venue, a hotel on Westbourne Grove, affords us a remarkable intimacy with the play. And, while Ravenhill's target - American religiosity - is a soft one, he treats it with care. Like an angel with broken wings, this double-bill is eye-catching, and possesses a certain grace; but it never quite flies.